


a pressure I can bear

by maypop



Category: Cruel Intentions (1999)
Genre: Gen, Mention of Eating Disorders, kathryn makes a friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:43:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/pseuds/maypop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After everything, there's no going back to Manchester.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a pressure I can bear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chicleeblair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicleeblair/gifts).



The problem with being a good person is that it's not particularly funny. Nor is it hard.

Tiresome, yes. But it's not difficult. Just think of the thing she wants least to do in any particular situation, and then do it. Morality is scanning the table for the lettuce, every single hour of every single day. It's boring. _She's_ boring.

Kathryn's been bored since Sebastian died. She doesn't think he'd hate her for that, but she doesn't _know_ , because he died in the full triumph of his ecstatic self-recrimination and left her living the stale backwash of someone else's redemption arc. Maybe he would have--the reformed rake seems like a more fun role than the repentant whore. What would she have done, if she were male and coddled and her sexual misadventures were exciting, rather than unforgivable contamination?

What would I have done--a reflex to train herself out of, now he's gone. Kathryn looks away from her writing and out the window, eyes skipping over the space around her with the ease of much practice. She hadn't been sure what she wanted to be, here at Saint Breadstick's International Academy for the Distressingly Slutty (or whatever), but she'd settled on _alone._ Easier to not hurt people if they weren't around her, itching to tell her their secrets.

(It had almost been interesting, for, like, a day. Performing Too Sad, In Mourning would have attracted Helper Girls, who wanted a project; Too Bitchy netted her girls who'd been kicked so often they started to like the boot, which was gross and disturbing; Too Weird would have gathered _art students_ ; Too Devoted to My Studies bred sycophants. In the end she turned to God, in the loudest and most obnoxious way possible. )

There are mountains outside the window. They're beautiful and about as interesting as a screensaver. The essay coalescing under her pen is a sanded-down, refinished version of one she wrote sophomore year, with burgeoning sexuality (let's talk after class, Mr. Liourdis) search and replaced with light of the Lord. The food on her plate is expertly prepared and tasteless. Mirabile visu, there's room around despair and fury and loss to be desperately fucking bored--

Someone is sitting down at her table.

"Hi," someone is saying. This is not a good day for this. Real Kathryn is too close to the surface today.

"Oh, bless you--" Kathryn drops her pen to sneeze gracefully but copiously. "--but I'm coming down with something, I don't think it's a good idea to sit there today..."

The girl catches the pen as it rolls towards her side of the table, and holds it out. Kathryn doesn't take it. She sets it down by Kathryn's textbook.

"I've had my rabies shot," she says, which is mean enough for Kathryn to give her a second glance. She's pretty in a way that is much too gay for Old Kathryn to have ever looked at, back in New York. Too many doors closed, when your friends had that kind of haircut.

"What?" New Kathryn says, gormlessness thick as library paste.

"Are you not eating? I thought bulimic was the one where you wore it out and then returned it," the girl says.

There are no rumors that Kathryn has an eating disorder. This could be a stab in the dark. Kathryn has feeling that it's not.

Kathryn leans forward in a _look at my tits_ kind of way and puts her hand over the new girl's. "Hurting others won't make the pain go away," she says. "Only the Lord can do that."

"Nice," the new girl says to Kathryn's chest. She turns her captured hand over and changes her patronizing clasp into laced together fingers. Danger, Will Robinson.

Kathryn sneezes into her free hand. She squeezes the girl's hand a little too tight, and moves her wrist so the clasp looks more awkward. New Kathryn who does the right thing shouldn't be afraid of looking gay. New Kathryn who does the right thing should stay the fuck away from incestuous, dramatic little cliques like the sport lesbians of St. Toenail's, though.

"Would you like me to pray with you?" Kathryn says.

"Honestly I really just want to know if you fucked Cecile?" she says. "The book sort of implied it, but I can't tell if that's just because your brother was really weird and wanted it to be true."

"Step," Kathryn says. "Stepbrother."

"Whatever." The girl runs her thumb across Kathryn's white knuckles. Peers down at them. "Don't _look_ bulimic."

Kathryn sees her choices in a bulleted list like Sebastian's stupid, dramatic, arty little diary.

 

_\--continue to talk about Jesus. Result: new girl gets bored. God (ha) knows how long that will take._

_\--cry. Result: new girl feels victorious, teachers break them up. Damaged Jesus Girl is now even more hilariously Damaged. Fastest option._

_\--leave. New Girl will follow, eventually._

_\--attack. Crack her open from her brash overcompensating to the insufficient calories on her own plate to the way no one is looking for or at her, even sitting at a table with Kathryn Merteuil, Jesus freak space oddity._

 

"I don't like to discuss my life before I was saved," Kathryn says, and leaves.

 

*

 

So the book has come to St. Dogfood's. It was going to happen eventually. Annette hadn't been subtle. What's the plan?

The plan stays the same. So now people will know (will think they know, fucking Sebastian) the specifics underlying her choir girl shit. This changes nothing. This school is a last chance hiding place for rich daughters who embarrass rich parents, there isn't anyone here she can't get a handle on and _yank_ \--

Old Kathryn thoughts. Kathryn closes herself in her bathroom and pinches the bridge of her nose and breathes. The girl crying in front of the church as her (twin, reflection, friend) step brother moldered in a box, remember, Kathryn? Remember defeat and fury and loneliness? Old Kathryn made that happen. Old Kathryn ruined people. So what if New Kathryn is bored (lonely) and horny all the damn time.

Kathryn sneers at the toilet and leaves the bathroom.

New Girl is _in her room_.

"You're not my type," Old Kathryn snaps through her mouth. And then: "I mean--"

"Of course I am," new girl says. And then: "Wait, no. Sorry. I handled all that... badly."

Kathryn can't think of anything to say other than _you think_ , so she doesn't say anything.

"What I wanted to say was--" New girl had been sitting on Kathryn's bed. (She doesn't have a roommate, thankfully, even if she does have to live in a dorm like a zoo animal.) Now she stands up and paces around, ringing her hands. She's leggy, taller than Kathryn even in her flat lesbian shoes. "How do you _do it?_ " she bursts out with, eventually.

"I stay hydrated and moisturize."

"And I appreciate it," new girl says. "But no. I read your brother's--step brother's book--and now you're... this."

Kathryn bristles. "This?"

"Doesn't it get _dull?_ " she says. She stops at the end of her route and spins on her heel, holding her hands out pleadingly to Kathryn.

Kathryn blinks. The world changes filters. New girl isn't trying to make her flinch. Or isn't _just_ trying for that.

At Kathryn's lack of response she starts pacing again, dragging one hand through her hair as she goes. It's short enough it becomes fetchingly tousled, rather than tangling around her nails or turning into a thicket. "Is this some kind of long con? Or was he lying, and you were never--"

"Shut up," Kathryn says, and rolls her eyes at the flicker of hope on new girl's face. "What's your name? What do you want?"

"Claire," she says. "And... I don't know. Company, I guess."

"Pretty sure that journal is supposed to be a cautionary tale for baby sluts, not a field guide," Kathryn says, and even just letting proper swear words out of her mouth for once feels--nice. Dangerous. Like stretching out something that needs to stay locked up.

Claire's _beaming_ , though. Kathryn closes her eyes for a second, two, then opens them. "I don't do that anymore. No, it's not a 'long con'." She invests the phrase with as much scorn as she can. "As for how, I--" She reaches for her necklace. The cross is small and gold and much more tasteful, these days.

"Please don't, I'm allergic."

Kathryn's hand hover over the necklace, then drops. "I buy a lot of batteries," she says instead.

Claire shouts with laughter and stops her pacing to fall back on Kathryn's bed. She grins at the ceiling. "I knew it! I knew you were acting."

Kathryn steps closer to the bed. "I'm not acting. Well, except the Jesus parts. I'm--" Sincerity feels like a dead animal in her chest. That means it's probably the right choice. "--I'm trying. To be better."

Claire's laughter dies. "Yeah?"

"Yes."

Claire holds up her arms, twitches one sleeve back. Still staring at the ceiling. Kathryn's unsurprised by the rope of scar tissue on her wrist. "Me too."

Kathryn finds she's gotten closer, close enough to sit on the bed, so she does. She keeps a careful inch between their hips, and then says to hell with it, and lays down slowly next to her, to stare at the ceiling together. Like a bunch of... teenage girls.

"Anyway," Claire says. "Your book's going around. I thought you'd want to know, is the point of all this, and I thought you might... want some company, too."

Kathryn looks at the ceiling and thinks about this, and Sebastian, and reputations, and plans, and what this will do to her reputation, and if she should care. After a while, she says:

"I didn't fuck Cecile."

Claire covers her eyes with her hands. "Aw, dammit. Really?"

"But I was getting there," she admits, and Claire crows triumphantly, and they lay there on the bed while Kathryn tells her the baby steps you have to take to be omnivorous but still faultlessly straight looking for the parents. When she's finished Claire tells her about what happens when you can't manage that, and some deeply insane story about St. Windowblind's hockey team, and by nightfall they've missed classes, and Kathryn has started to think that New Kathryn might not have to be alone forever, to keep from hurting anyone.


End file.
